


Go Where the Lights Turn Dark

by ivynights (incantatem)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-12
Updated: 2011-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-27 05:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incantatem/pseuds/ivynights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her mother tells her to marry a man who makes his living with his hands.</p><p>(Mal backstory)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Go Where the Lights Turn Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this](http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/4946.html?thread=6046034#t6046034) km prompt.
> 
> Title from "Hello, Tomorrow" by Squeak E. Clean & Karen O.

Her mother tells her to marry a man who makes his living with his hands. Something tangible, something concrete. Not someone like her father, an intellectual dreamer who is more concerned with the possibility of what could be than with what exists within the walls of his own home.

Her mother tells her a lot of things.

Mal knows she is headstrong, like her mother, and a thinker, like her father. Her sense of whimsy is all her own.

Some of her mother’s advice and critiques are valid; her father should pay more attention to their family unit than he does, locked away in his study surrounded by rolls of drawings, piles of books at his feet and the light from a computer screen illuminating his desk till the wee hours of the morning.

He means well though, this Mal knows is true.

Still, no matter one’s best intentions, not everything works out for the best.

Her parents separate when she’s fifteen. They never divorce but they never reunite either.

.

Her father returns to teach in his native England and she stays in Paris with her mother. They move out of her childhood home and into an apartment in the heart of the city. Their rooms are on the second story of the building but Mal likes to sneak up to the roof and stay out there for hours, looking down below at the labyrinthine streets and imagining.

With her father gone, her mother has even more attention to direct toward Mal.

“Don’t cut your hair short,” she says.

“You should call that Laurent boy back,” she says.

“Stay in Paris for university,” she says.

Mal knows her mother means just as well as her father does.

She sneaks out with her friends and goes dancing on school nights. She goes to museums alone on the weekends, spending hours staring at art, imagining different times and far off places. She retreats to her rooftop and plots a million different courses for her future.

.

She doesn’t see her father much again until university.

Her mother is worried and angry. She doesn’t want her to go to Oxford and threatens a thousand things, false promises a thousand more. But Mal refuses to be bound.

“I’ll study medicine,” she lies, just to make the dream a reality, just to get to take the first steps, just to _get there_ , “then I’ll come back and practice in France.”

Her father is surprised to see her sitting in the center of his latest batch of architecture students on the first day of classes.

“What are you doing, Mallory?” he hisses, pulling her aside after class.

“I’m doing what I want to,” she says, “Focusing on what actually interests me. Isn’t that what you’ve always done?”

“This is not what your mother agreed to,” her father says, but his face is already resigned.

“I play by my own rules,” Mal responds.

.

She’s decided to play sweet and is bringing her father a small surprise lunch when she meets him.

“But Professor,” says a male voice, earnest, insistent, American, “There’s got to be some way to support the roof at a stronger curved angle.”

Mal pauses by the doorway, curious. She peaks around the corner and sees the back of a dirty blond head, his spine curved at he points down at architectural plans rolled out on her father’s desk. Her father’s reading glasses have slipped down his nose, he pushes them up with one finger while the fingers of the other hand trace along the lines of a drawing. Their heads are bent together.

“There is a way,” her father says, and Mal has never heard him sound this way before, a strange mixture of hesitance and excitement, “But it would not exactly be orthodox.”

“Unorthodox is good,” insists the student, “Unorthodox is great! It’s all about innovation these days, a thirst for something new. That’s what you say in class all the time.”

“Yes, I thought you might pick up on that,” says her father, “Dominic, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

This has got to be the reason her father spent so many hours holed up alone in his study, while her mother’s ire grew and Mal practiced patience in biding her time. She knew he was working on something big. Something secret. Mal leans closer, enraptured.

She hits the door; it squeaks.

Two sets of eyes flash in her direction, one old and familiar, one new and bright blue. She knows the look in the student’s eyes, appreciative and evaluating. It’s one she’s felt from others many times before, but she is unexpectedly caught herself and returns his gaze with interest.

“Hi,” she says, “I was just bringing you some lunch.”

Her father’s posture relaxes. “Hello, Mallory. That was very kind of you. Mal, this is Dominic Cobb, from my advanced architecture class. Dominic, my daughter, Mallory.”

“From his introductory architecture class,” she adds, and walks forward to place a brown paper bag on the corner of the desk.

“A pleasure to meet you,” Dominic says, “Call me Dom.” The interest is still there in his eyes, but he’s cowed it somewhat under her father’s stern gaze.

She smiles at him and, because she’s sick of staying within the boundaries, she rips a scrap of paper off the edge of one of the drawings and scribbles her number down in blue ink. “Dom,” she says, “Just call me.”

She walks out then, a spring in her step and a small smile on her face as her father sputters in the background.

.

She doesn’t hear from Dom right away. She suspects her father scared him into forgoing all contact. Then she tells herself she wouldn’t want to date a man who so willingly played by the rules anyway.

Of course just then the phone rings.

.

On their first date, they go out to a museum. Mal wonders if Dom’s just trying to impress her. But Mal has to says his name again, and the _again_ before he responds, lost in thoughts as he stares at a sketch of the Colosseum.

Dom is passion. He’s full of big ideas, buildings he wants to design, places he wants to show her.

He buys her a necklace after only one month of seeing each other. As he reaches into his pocket, he looks a little sheepish but he doesn’t falter in his movements.

There are fingerprint-sized bruises on her hips. She looks at them in a mirror and runs one of her own fingertips across them lightly, private smile playing on her lips.

He doesn’t hold back on her and she loves him for it.

.

“What is it my father’s doing?” she asks Dom one night, curled in his embrace as sweat cools on their skin. She slides her fingers up his chest, toying with the sparse hairs there.

Dom’s eyes are faraway and the corner of his mouth tilts up, an expression she’s come to associate with the nights he doesn’t leave her father’s office until much too late. Sometimes she’ll storm in and drag him out. Other times she eavesdrops instead.

“It’s amazing,” Dom answers, and he drops his gaze from the middle distance to look straight into her eyes, “You’d be brilliant at it.”

.

Dom proposes under the night sky. She only finds out later, from her father, that he asked permission first.

He’s down on one knee and Mal joins him on the ground, laughing and kissing him as she nods her head yes.

When they pull back for air, Mal looks up at the infinite pinpricks of light above them. Poets and philosophers have made a lot of the stars, rambling on about how they make one feel small, feel insignificant. Mal feels like she could reach out and grab one. She looks at her fiancés’ eyes and sees how the lights reflects off his blue.

“Yes, I’ll marry you,” she says. He grasps her hands in his own and she falls even further in love with him in that moment, in the curve of the helpless grin on his face, the exhilaration in his eyes. “We’ll be partners. In everything.”

He knows what she’s referring to. They’ve been planning this for a while now.

“In everything, of course,” Dom says, “We’ll never be apart.”

.

She tells her father she wants him to take her out for lunch for her birthday. He can hardly refuse. They eat and then walk over to a park near the university. Mal walks along the edge of a pond while her father sits on a bench nearby.

“Remember the summer I was twelve and we took that vacation to Venice?” she asks, crumbling a piece of bread she’d saved from lunch to throw to some geese.

“Yes,” her father says, tone slightly wry but mild, “You ran away. Your mother was hysterical.”

“I found a family of ducks living in a canal,” Mal says, “One duckling broke off from the rest. I followed to see where it would go.”

“I’m sure the mother duck was worried sick.”

“She should have been proud. She had an adventurer.”

This is how her father likes to communicate and she is humoring him. But she is tired of the indirect obliques.

“Dom told me all about your research. About your experiments. About the dreams.”

She sees her father tense in her peripheral vision.

“Mallory-“ he starts.

“No, papa, enough already.” She turns to face him fully. “I’ve aced every exam in your class and you know how my mind works. I want in. We both know I could do it. You have to at least let me try.”

His expression is the familiar one of wary resignation that she’s come to think of as her own. She would prefer it be one of fondness or enthusiasm, but she’s learned to work with what she gets.

.

She is tired of fighting with her mother. Her mother, who wants her back in Paris, studying something practical, away from her father’s influence, and that of his so-called no-good American protégé’.

“Maman,“ Mal says, frustration making her even more blunt than normal. “It doesn’t matter if I marry a dreamer. _I am one_.”

.

The first time she enters the dreamscape is an experience like none other.

Dom stands to her right, excited grin on his face as he watches her soak it all in. Her father stands behind them, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched slightly. She ignores them both.

She conjures up a ladder and climbs to the top.

“What are you doing, Mal?” Dom asks, more curious than wary. Her father stays silent.

Mal streaks her hand across the air above her, watching as the space turns black and thousands of stars emerge. Night spreads across the dreamscape and light blossoms in its path.

From below she hears Dom let out a little laugh. “Don’t change too much though,” he calls up to her, “You don’t want the projections to turn on you.”

She stands on top of her ladder and looks out. Over there, she could build something grander than the Eiffel Tower and, just beyond it, she could call up the grand carousel that’s been a part of her daydreams ever since she was a young child.

The possibilities are limitless; she stands upon an intoxicating precipice and all she has to do is jump.


End file.
